Agric minister’s promise

AT a time when the Federal Government should be facilitating the steadying of increased and improved agricultural production and productivity, it is just embarking on stop-gap measures to address the prices of staple foods that have gone through the roof. This administration has been in the saddle for more than 12 months and that is more than enough for farmers in the country to have produced staple foods in sufficient quantities if the government had got down to brass tacks early enough, especially against the backdrop of its policy options which it should have realised would occasion the exacerbation of food inflation, among other consequences. However, it was just last week that the Federal Government, through the Minister of Agriculture, Senator Abubakar Kyari, unveiled the strategic measures aimed at addressing the high food prices nationwide. The minister, during the declaration of the strategies, added that the prices of items would crash in the next 180 days (January 2025). The minister also said the measures which include the suspension of duties, tariffs, and taxes for the importation of certain food commodities through land and sea borders, as well as the importation of 500,000 metric tonnes of wheat and maize, would tackle the rise in food prices. According to him, the commodities to be imported include maize, husked brown rice, wheat, and cowpeas and he stated that the imported food commodities would be subjected to a Recommended Retail Price (RRP).

It is good that the government will be ordering some of these food items in semi-processed form. At least, that will give local processors the opportunity to add value to the items using local labour. Other official measures designed to ease food inflation include engagement with relevant stakeholders to set a standard and purchase surplus food commodities to restock the National Strategic Food Reserve, “and a ramp-up of production for the 2024/2025 farming cycle.” These measures are crucial judging by the excruciating impact of economic hardship in the land, which is largely fuelled by food inflation. It is nonetheless very disappointing that everything is still within the realm of verbal commitment. One year after, it is still a tale of promise by the minister and the current administration. The minister made lofty promises last year but there have been virtually no tangible outcomes to match the promises. Yet, another set of verbal commitments are being pushed out to the citizens at a time when official promises are hardly taken seriously again by many as a result of serial failures to deliver on previous promises. For instance, the same government promised that the Port Harcourt refinery would work by December 2023, and despite the rescheduling of the timeline to April this year, production has yet to commence in July.

A few questions on the details of the strategic measures to address rising prices food items are imperative in order to underscore the thoroughness or otherwise of the strategies. One, the minister gave a six-month timeline: what happens before then? Is the minister suggesting that the current scary trajectory of food inflation will have to be endured by the citizenry for the next six months, just like that? And in any case, what projections informed the choice of six months? Why not three months, for instance? Again, previously, the government said Nigerians must grow what they eat. Now, it is talking about importation. So, which is it? Worse still, is the emphasis on local food production being abandoned? And we may also ask, where are former President Muhammadu Buhari’s rice pyramids that were celebrated with fanfare, even though the price of rice has been on the upward trajectory since then? What is the impact of the Anchor Borrowers Programme which reportedly constitutes a huge chunk of sticky debt in the Central Bank of Nigeria’s books? Also recently, the government said it was opening up the grain reserves. So what happened? We ask these questions because we want the government to know that citizens are keeping tabs on its policies and promises and the delivery thereof, or lack of it.

The government has a duty to ensure that all its policies and programmes are well thought out and brook no threshold of tolerance for failure. This is not the season to shoot in the dark. Every official decision or action must be taken with the goal of optimizing the outcome. This has not been the case lately, but the government can no longer, and should no longer, condone intolerable variance between the expected and actual results of official action. Against this backdrop, the government is urged to re-examine its proposed strategies to rein in food inflation and ensure that the probability of realising the expected outcomes is high. The citizenry is becoming increasingly unable to absorb shocks and disappointments.

The United Nations World Food Programme and the Action Aid Against Hunger recently ranked Nigeria among the world’s hotspots, underscoring the country’s dire food insecurity and crisis situation. Besides, the daily feedback from Nigerians across the social media platforms and during one-on-one interactions indicate that a lot of people are truly miserable and hungry. In other words, there is no gainsaying that the country is in extreme danger with regard to its food security situation, and so it needs all the solutions it can muster to change the potentially perilous course of events. Nonetheless, while we approve of any measure that will reduce the prices of food items, we will like to note that such measures should have been taken much earlier before the challenge assumed this dangerous dimension. Also, we believe that these measures, especially food importation, would not have been necessary at this point in time if the government had focused mainly on increasing food production and productivity from the outset. For instance, if the magnitude and ramifications of the expected spin-offs from some critical policy decisions of government had been properly dimensioned on an apriori basis, an immediate recourse to increase in acreage cultivation of food crops and enhancement of farmers’ productivity in the production of these basic food crops ought to have been made. We welcome the official measures the government proposes to take to tackle escalating food prices with cautious optimism, even as we urge it to realise that it cannot afford to fail this time around.

It is imperative for the government to note that a more pragmatic and sustainable solution to the challenge of food inflation lies in increased local production of food crops and a deliberate introduction of measures aimed at bolstering local farmers’ productivity.